Monday, June 12
You have a particular rehearsal method: often you rehearse other scenes... — There are films where you need to rehearse, but it's true, I don't like rehearsing scenes that I'm about to shoot. So there are times when you need to rehearse something a little different. Jean-Pol and I write scenes which are not in the script, just for rehearsal purposes. Because I'm too afraid, if I rehearse a scene, that I'll find myself saying during the shoot: it was so good earlier, now it's gone. I think what's painful for me when I'm not shooting is to have to exist. I don't mean 'to live', because that's something else again. You have to justify everything you do. What I like during filming is that these are moments when you have the right not to reply and to let things happen. Before the shoot, after the shoot, you have to account for everything.
But do you like that chance when you're shooting as well because in some of the films there is a feel of documentary, a feel of real events happening and I'm thinking of S'en Fout la Mort where we see real cock fighting. — Yeah, but S'en Fout la Mort was rehearsed. We did rehearse a lot. But we rehearsed, I was telling Denis Lavant this morning on the train and Michel Subor, that we always rehearsed other scenes, never the real script. For S'en Fout La Mort, we were rehearsing a Jean Eustache script, La Maman et la Putain with two boys. We rehearse the very opposite from what we are going to shoot so that we are together in a kind of womb. We want to work together, but the script is not completely unveiled. I hate to rehearse a scene, because then I am not interested in shooting the scene or then I have to change it. It has to be completely new the day we shoot. Otherwise... but I don't mean that as a principle as if I were right, to me it's the way of being certain that something might happen. Something that I have not prepared, something that really makes every one of us ready for what we have not prepared.
— Claire Denis
